March 19, 2018
In 1785, Robert Burns composed a poem, part of which is very famously used probably daily by someone, somewhere on Planet Earth. The part you’ll know is (in modern English): “The best laid schemes of mice and men, often go awry.” (My title — Gang aft agley — is the Scots language version of ‘often go awry.’) We all experience this at some point.
My plan for St. Patrick’s Day was to fly to Dublin, TX for a fly-in. It is one of the few fly-in’s that focus on gyroplanes (but not exclusively so). From my home airport, it was a 3-hour straight-shot to the northwest. My brother, Jim, agreed to go, as well, so it was to be quite the outing! Yet, despite the weather in Dublin being good throughout the day, the weather around my home airport never got much better than “misty.”
Even the night prior, it was clear that it, uh, wasn’t going to clear. Fog was forecast until about 11 am. To get to Dublin with time to walk around a bit, we would have to have left no later than 9 am. The trip to Dublin was out, then. Yet, since the forecast said the cloud base would rise above 2,000 feet by 1 pm, I told Jim to meet me at the hangar by noon, and we’d choose an alternative local place to fly to….. perhaps to Brazoria County airport again. Ah, optimism!
I’m lucky in that I can go out to the hangar on weekdays, so I usually have the entire place to myself. When we arrived, we found out that not only was it a typically busy Saturday, but there was also a club meeting! Needless to say, there were a lot of people and a lot of things going on. But it was nice to see the other members and chat a bit. Looking at the sky, it was hard to tell what the ceiling was, but it was low. The air was heavy with moisture, and occasionally I’d feel a bit of mist. We decided to give it a shot.
I had almost full fuel, and my brother is somewhat heavier than I am, so we were near MTOW (max take-off weight). The factor I hadn’t thought too much about was the density altitude. It was a warm day… 85-87 F, and since the time I ferry’d the plane from Maryland (in January), this would be the warmest day I had yet flown. But I wasn’t thinking about that. (Later, I calculated the density altitude to be around 2100 feet.)
Rolling down the runway, that ignored factor soon became front-and-center. I could tell almost right away that everything was happening more slowly than I was now used to. I picked up speed slower, the nose-wheel came up later than I was used to and didn’t try to leap up. We were lumbering down the runway for quite some time before finally lifting off, then my ascending speed was definitely much slower. For just a moment, I wondered if I should abort because it would be really bad if I couldn’t gain any altitude!
But ascend we did, albeit slowly. Usually I’m at 500 feet by the time the end of the runway is under me. This time, the engine was at full blast for another minute or more. We did manage 1000 feet before I throttled back to a normal RPM, but even the normal RPM was higher than I was used to to maintain this altitude. When we leveled out, I could pry my attention away from the aerodynamics for a moment, and looked around at the conditions. It was… misty. The ceiling was only a little above us. This was not looking good.
Despite that, we decided to fly around the local area for a while, to see if anything opened up. We’d go a few minutes in one direction, then we’d see rain on the windshield, and turn away… go a few minutes in that direction, and hit more light rain… and so on. So, we meandered around trying to find anything that resembled something other than the poor conditions we’d already experienced, but with no luck. After almost 40 minutes we finally decided to give up.
I landed a little fast due to the extra weight, but it was probably not necessary and in any event was uneventful. Back at the hangar, the sky looked slightly better, but we knew better than to be seduced by a few patches of blue sky. We stood around chatting for a while, hoping conditions would improve but it was not to be. I reluctantly de-geared and pushed the plane back into its spot, cleaned it up and said ‘cheerio’ to the members that were left.
Shortly after we left the airport, my brother and I stopped to eat a late lunch/early dinner, and noticed the sky was now mostly blue. “It’s mocking us,” I said. Jim agreed, but it was too late in the day to do anything about it. Sigh. Still, we did fly a bit and Jim — an accomplished fixed-wing pilot in his own right — got his first experience in a gyroplane. Not a total loss, then. We both had fun!
The important information I came away with from this day was that a density altitude of 2000+ would have a fairly profound affect on my performance. I can’t be sure, but it seems my fuel consumption will increase by almost 20%, so I must make my future flight planning with that in mind. It’s good information to know.
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